u/arcangleous

This is a continuation of my previous post of the World of Ahros [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/mapmaking/comments/1tgru8z/welcome\_to\_the\_world\_of\_ahros/).

I've done some more work on my world of Ahros, and I think I've made some improvements. There was a little bit of interest in my process and the tools I used, so I decided to go over that as well.

So I started with the height map I had built in [GIMP](https://www.gimp.org/downloads/) by stitching together several maps of moons and parts of Earth. In order to get the poles to look nice, I used GIMP's polar coordinates filter to view the map for the poles, do my stitching, and transform the map back to the normal projection. The only major change I had made from the previous version is to flood the continent of Ish as I wanted to make my elves an seafaring Polynesian inspired civilization.

Once I had made my changes to the raw height map, I imported it into [Orogen Studio](https://www.orogen.studio/) and used it's terrain sculpting tool to do some basic erosion simulation and generate some more realistic looking mountain ridges. I turned the details settings up extremely high, but there is still some loss of details. It just can't generate enough triangles to cover every pixel uniquely. I corrected for this by merging the orogen erosion with the original height map. I then fed the merged map into [Wilbur](http://www.fracterra.com/wilbur.html) to do a more detailed erosion simulation. I masked the results from Wilbur back with the original map's landmask to restore the lakes and in-land sea that Wilbur had filled in, and feed that back into Orogen Studio to get the biomes and a nice looking satellite map. The other thing I got from Wilbur's erosion simulation was rivers and I'd included them on the satellite map.

I haven't done much with regions and civilizations since my last iteration. The largest changes are to use borders that are more based on the actual terrain and rivers instead of just "This looks right", splitting the Orc's native homelands "Kyo" off from Uru, and creating the region of Siria as a giant desert would generally isolate those lands and their people from the neighbouring Ios and Mer.

Ahros is a world I've made primarily by stitching various real geography from both earth and various various moons from around the solar system (Upvotes if you can spot them). Once I was happy with how it looked, I feed it into Orogen Studios to get the biomes and adjusted the height map until I got biomes I liked. There's probably still some minor tweaking to do, making sure that a couple of islands stay islands and the like, but overall I'm satisfied.

The goal is to use it a setting for RPG game and I've also started to do some worldbuilding. I've divided the large eastern continent into several regions with simple names. Ios and Mer are dominated this setting versions of human, mapping generally onto medieval Europe, with Ios being more France inspired and Mer more Spain. Nor is ruled by giants, though there are independent dwarf kingdoms in the large mountain range that spans between Nor, Tan and Uru. Uru was home to the Orcish Empire, now fallen. The southern segment bordered by Soun and Ezt was home to numerous troll tribes, and conflict with them was a major part of the Orcish Empire's downfall. There other major cause was a slave revolt by their goblin administrators, who fled through the mountains into Ezt. Minotaurs build their labyrinths in Tan, while the Elves come from Ish and spread outward into the continents that I haven't come up with names with yet. There is also a sizable population of Elves on large islands on the edge of Mer, as a result of a large colonization fleet getting lost during a hurricane on the endless ocean and settling where they landed. Soun is going to be African inspired, with gnolls living in nomadic hunting tribes. I haven't entirely decided what I am going to do with the two large continent yet, but I am open to ideas.

What do people think of the map?